When Publishers Stalked The Earth

By Mel C. Thompson

Instead of just publishing another volume of poetry, the author decides to tell the stories of the illustrious publishing personalties he met with and tell how they affected his literary life. In between the stories and descriptions of these publishers are assorted poems by the author which found their way into the publications these editors oversaw. It is more the story of a movement than a poetry book, although the author hopes that the poems themselves give a hint of the flavor of the works that were being published at that time. While a certain amount of academic and formal poetry was to be found, the most notable work of that time was brazen confessional poetry of the sort which would be frowned up in this age of word police, thought police and neo-puritanism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mel C. Thompson
• Release date: Oct 31, 2018
• ISBN: 9780463433584

Mel C. Thompson

Mel C. Thompson is a retired wage slave who survived by working through temp agencies and guard agencies. Unable to survive in the real world of full-time, permanent work, he migrated from building to building, going wherever his agencies sent him, doing any type of work he could feign competency in and staying as long as those fragile arrangements could last. He somehow managed to get a B.A in Philosophy from Cal-State Fullerton in spite of his learning disorders and health problems. Unable to sustain family life due to depression, anxiety, sleep disorders, lack of transportation and lack of income, he lives alone in low-income housing and wanders around California on buses and trains. He began writing at the age of 14 and continues till the current day. (He turns 64 in June of 2023). In his early years he wrote pathetic love poetry until, in his thirties, he was engulfed by cynicism and fell in with a group of largely antisocial poets who wrote about the underground life of drugs, sex, alcohol, poverty, prostitution, heresy, isolation and alienation. In his fortes he turned to prose and began to write religious fiction with an emphasis on the comedic aspect of theology and philosophy. He now writes short novels focusing on the attempt to find meaning in a economic world beset with money laundering, unethical marketing, contraband smuggling, human trafficking, patent trolling, corrupt contracting and every manner of spiritual and psychological desperation and degradation. When he is not writing, he wanders from hospital to medical clinic to surgical room attempting to sustain what little health he has left after a lifetime of complications resulting from birth defects and genetic problems. When he is able, he engages in such hobbies as reading, walking, yoga and meditation; and whenever there is any money left over from his healthcare-related quests, he goes to wine tastings and searches for foodie-related bargains. Before the pandemic, he spent many years gaming various travel-points systems and wrangled many free trips to Europe. He is divorced and has no children, no pets, no real estate, no stocks nor any other assets beyond the $550 in his savings account. His career peaked in the early 2000s when he did comedy gags for a radio station and had about 10,000 listeners per week. However, currently, he may have as few as five active readers on any given day. He no longer has the stamina to promote his work and only finds new readers through ran...

Book preview

When Publishers Stalked The Earth

Mel C. Thompson

Copyright © 2011 & 2018

To contact the author or find out the many ways you can help the ongoing efforts of all the authors in the Mel C. Thompson Publishing Company lineup, please use the contact information below:

Mel C. Thompson Publishing

3559 Mount Diablo Boulevard, #112

Lafayette, California 94549

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This book is dedicated to the late Bob White and the late Steve Parr. They were both promoters of live poetry shows in the 1990s, and they strove to provide the poets with the best venues to perform in. They promoted our work tirelessly and saw to it that we got paid for performing, a very rare thing in the poetry world. May their kindness and generosity always be remembered. This book is also dedicated to the late William Perkins, publisher, writer, teacher and friend, and to the late Dominique Lowell, beloved friend, poet and performer.

Formatting Note

While man of the poems in this work are in their original form, several of them appear as prose works. These particular pieces originally appeared in poetic form with each sentence sometimes being broken up into several lines. However, many people had previously complained that I was, in fact, naturally a prose writer and not really a poet. They further opined that what I was often doing was writing a series of aphorisms, or a list of observations, which would be more profitably composed in prose form. This evaluation of my work comes in handy as I commence to attempt to compile these works into an ebook. Only certain types of poetic line breaks work well in ebooks, whereas certain whole sentences usually seem more compatible with ebook text flow. Because the loss of poetic line breaks may change the effect of some works, some of the works may vary from their originally-published forms and certain editing liberties may be taken as I proceed to translate these poems into prose.

Table of Contents

Foreword: When Publishers Stalked The Earth

Notes On Richard Hack And Some Thoughts On The Cloud House

Got Lucky

On Their Respective Crosses

In Search Of Imperfection

In Praise Of The Unexamined Life

Until Your Marriage Resumes

The Serious People

The Open Reading

El Catedral Juarez

On The Road To Lubbock

Reentry Into The Office World

Middle Age

A New Defiance

Pride

The Night I Almost Became A Republican

Enough

Incense Offering

A Poem For Samantha

The Search For My Mother

The Olympic Spirit

Notes On William Perkins

Lyric For Guatama

Wack 'O' Lantern

Northwest Haiku

Notes On Alan Kaufman

My Cowardly Groveling Prayers And The Logic Behind Them

Notes On klipschutz

Things We Had Sex With

Poppin In The Foam

Non-Affirmation

The God Of Buck Mulligan

Latchkey Househusbands

National Anthem

Serious

Notes On Kathi Georges

A Related Historical Note

The Courteous Vampire

Notes On Vince Storti

Demerol

The Foster City Investigations

Notes On Emily Yau

The Dark Ocean

Notes On Walter Biller

Tent City

When We Live In Santa Fe

National Anthem

Notes On Neeli Cherkovski And Christopher Byck

There Once Was A Sparrow

A Micro-History Of A Pre-Punk Band

Speculative Profiles Of Judy And Sheena

Her Boyfriend In His Dreams

Notes On Marvin R. Hiemstra And Jannie Dresser

Formal Injunctions On The Worship Of Vicodin

Notes On Assorted Roving Publishers

Amy Makes Me Remember

Vampire House Problems

To Aliza (Who Found Love In Australia And Will Never Be The Same)

Steve Arntson's Home (The Dharma Yacht Club)

What If

Apostolic File # 4

Sanity

God Is Great

Excerpt #43: from File Clerk At Allianz

Second-To-Last Phone Call

Tennessee Valley Home

Dance

Nylon Sharks

Thunder

A State Of Readiness

Diary Of An Average Man

Foreword: When Publishers Stalked The Earth

Return to Table of Contents

If I were to give my fifty-something definition of Heaven, I would say that it is a time and place, usually in our past, that seems like a Garden of Eden compared to our current conditions. We can only know that we used to be in heaven and cannot see heaven now. That is because human nature is striving, and striving can never know its current bliss, but can only, in repose, realize what bliss was. Heaven was very real, and now, decades later, we are sufficiently distant from it to have a clear view of it.

Like my previous book, Living The Zine Life, this book has as its first goal to promote my rather shameless egotism. But it also shares a secondary goal, to educate the reader, through some biographical statements, and some samplings of poetry, about how it felt to live and write in the most electrifying stage of my life and the lives that were artistically entwined with mine. (However, heaven, as I defined it, has tendrils which reach into the present moment; and so while I do pine for what I call the glory days, it must be pointed out, from time to time, that wondrous arms from that past octopus of literary bounty still extend forward to the present, making that literary octopus a time traveler too.) And finally, this project seeks to credit many heroes in my life for giving their life blood, life energy, and often every ounce of intangible spirit, to the cause of trying to build a cultural and literary world that would live on after them and perhaps bring about some perverse utopia, even in our own time.

Since those days many critics have filled my ears with their dull sermons aimed at discrediting what so many publishers I knew were trying to do. And still others worry incessantly that our message went out to too many people without the proper qualifications and without the proper injunctions necessary to ensure writers worked diligently enough. In short, a bunch of grumpy main-streamers are very worried that we underground creeps had way too much fun, got a bit too much glory and did not properly suffer to attain poetic precision and perfectionism. They are, in short, unhappy that we reaped too much undeserved ecstasy before chronic ill health, chronic madness or death claimed us. They really wished we had fretted along with them, hoping all along we would eventually succumb to their gospel of control-freaking literary classism. But, at last, we were recidivists, and no cure was ever found.

What made the prime of my life so wonderful was the fact that getting published, in the microcosm I existed in, happened organically, naturally and holistically, without all the forced guidelines one sees in the hideous document called Poet's Market and all such satanic documents like it. Few of my associates were busy with today's fawning workshop obsequiousness that, in the end, turns out too often to be a series of pyramid schemes and bribery rackets. (It would have been inconceivable to most of my early poetic friends to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars to win the approval of poets whose very essence was